Money item dispensing systems, such as those used in monetary payout systems to dispense selected coins to retail customers, generally include a plurality of money item hoppers for dispensing money items. The hoppers are often single denomination hoppers, meaning that each hopper contains a plurality of money items which all have the same denomination. When the system is required to dispense a particular value of money items, the system causes money items to be released from one or more appropriate single denomination hoppers in order to make up the value of the required payout.
A typical coin-based currency contains a relatively large number of different denominations of coins and therefore, in order to be able to quickly pay out each denomination of coin, a monetary dispensing system may contain a correspondingly large number of single denomination hoppers. Typically, between four and eight hoppers will be required to fit within the relatively small space envelope which has been specified for the system. Generally, each hopper has the same fixed size and so the solution is not ideal in terms of coin volumes in the system.
An alternative solution, which requires fewer hoppers, is to provide single denomination hoppers for only a subset of coin denominations. The remaining denominations of coins are generally not available for dispensing and therefore it is sometimes required to make payouts using a larger number of coins than would be required if the full coin set were available.